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Hi, friends! I originally had something else planned for this week but I got a massive influx of new subscribers from my style story being featured on
’s newsletter, as well as a decently number from being cited in this week. Welcome!I’ve been meaning to answer some reader questions and this felt like the perfect time to say hello, explain what you can expect from this newsletter, and respond to some of the (not-so?) burning questions I got from subscribers over in the chat.
So, who am I?
I’m a journalist with a focus on sports, culture, gender, and queerness—and particularly the ways those things intersect.
Maybe you’ve seen some of my work:
An award-winning feature for Sports Illustrated on where non-binary athletes fit into the gendered world of sports
The hidden history of the queer women who played for the All-American Girls Baseball League (which was used as inspiration and research for the Amazon Prime series, A League of Their Own)
A piece for The Washington Post on why the WNBA can be compared to Alice’s Chart from The L Word
A Cosmo dispatch from Camp Gaylore, a weekend-long retreat for queer Taylor Swift fans
Oh, and my book: HAIL MARY: The Rise and Fall of the National Women’s Football League, which tells the true story of the first professional women’s football league in U.S. history (think A League of Their Own meets GLOW, but football in the 1970s)
What happens around these parts?
Welcome to Out of Your League, a newsletter that sits at the intersection of sports and pop culture. Every work week, you can expect one or two installments that run the gamut from an interview with someone doing cool work in this space, cultural criticism or analysis, or bonus content related to reporting that I’ve published elsewhere (that bonus content is for paid subscribers!). I don’t cover men’s sports unless it’s gay, and many readers have described my work as being written for people who don’t think they like sports so don’t be deterred at first if you don’t think sports are for you. You won’t find any Xs or Os here, and I aim to be accessible to readers of all familiarity levels.
Each weekend you’ll have two newsletters hit your inbox: Saturday is my round-up of pop culture reading, sometimes with a little intro commentary and sometimes not, and that’s always free. Sundays are my weekly “Haterade” rant, alongside sports-related reading round-ups. The rant is free, the links are paywalled.
I also host live threads for some sporting events in the Out of Your League chat, and those are for paid subscribers. I’ll be rolling out some other paid subscriber benefits soon, too, so stay tuned, and there miiiiight be a podcast component being added soon but I don’t want to do too much too soon and overwhelm myself.
Now for your questions!
Most of the questions were about my writing and this newsletter, so let’s get into it!
Have you ever written about how you got into journalism? Have you always wanted to write?
I’ve talked about this in interviews over the years, but I’ll rehash the short version here. My Master’s is in mental health counseling and I was working as a social worker when I had my first child in 2014. I was pushed out of my job on maternity leave and was trying to figure out how to make money working from home with a newborn, because childcare costs were so expensive and my then-husband didn’t really make enough to support us on his own.
I’ve always loved writing but never thought I could make a career out of it because I’d never taken any classes and was completely self-taught. But I’d always had a blog; I started blogging in college with an anonymous sex blog (some of my readers have been with me since then! hi!). Blogging taught me a lot—how to write for an audience, how to hone a narrative voice, how to keep to a writing schedule. Eventually I started a new blog where I didn’t write about sex and used my name.
I posted on Facebook about needing to budget our groceries and asking for tips and an internet friend messaged me privately to ask if I’d ever considered writing for money. I hadn’t—who would pay me to write? She thought my blogs showed a knack for essay writing and connected me with an editor at Cosmo, as well as adding me to the Binders groups on Facebook. Soon I had a Cosmo byline and then read as much as I could about how to pitch editors. I wrote shitty personal essays for $50-$100 a pop, which I then leveraged into writing reported essays and learned how to report, eventually pivoting to pitching straight reporting.
By 2017, I was mostly a journalist and elbowing my way into sports writing by trying to create a niche where I saw a gap.
Have you ever struggled with editors or readers not taking your work seriously because you're a trans person writing about (among other things) gender and queerness?
Yes. All the time. What I find most commonly, however, is the idea that I’m biased because of my identities or I am having to justify to editors why they should use certain language or framing. Another challenge I face is that many publications think trans athlete stories are niche and that if they run one, they can’t run another for many months even if the stories are entirely different—about different sports or different issues relating to trans participation in sport. The nuance gets flattened and overlooked.
Do you pitch any of the topics that become Out of Your League newsletters to publications before you end up publishing them here?
It depends what it is! Sometimes, yes. Other times it’s something that I know won’t be enough of a “story” for a publication. Some examples of stories that were pitched to publications and not accepted:
Sometimes stories start as newsletters and then I realize they are bigger than that, like these:
And sometimes I always know they’ll be a newsletter, like these:
Does having a newsletter allow you to write about different topics or let you have a stronger 'voice' in your writing?
One of the best and most fun parts of this newsletter has been rediscovering my writing voice. Journalism and writing for publications with a house style really stripped me of a lot of the voicer aspects of my writing. I can show a lot more of my personality here, whether that’s incorporating astrology into my analysis or taking 3,000 words to write about CT Tamburello’s two decade-long career on competition reality television (or Trishelle Cannatella’s!) and how his game has evolved over that time. I can do Q&As with people doing cool work without worrying whether it’s timely of if there’s “enough” to pitch a story with.
In the early stages, how did you get into a steady rhythm of publishing for the newsletter? How did you plan what and when you’d publish?
This has been an ongoing and evolving process and it’s still evolving. I’ve had a version of this newsletter since 2019 and it was always free. Because I wasn’t asking people to pay for content, I didn’t feel obligated to have any kind of a publishing schedule and I mostly sent things to promote new work or career developments. After the freelance market collapsed and I decided to monetize about six months ago, it was important to me that it feel worth paying for, which meant regular content.
I knew that newsletters to promote my work and include bonus content about it would continue. Other than that, I’ve just followed my heart in terms of what I’ve wanted to write. I avoided monetizing for a long time because the common advice about newsletters is that they work best when you have a very strong focus and niche and my neurospicy brain has too many interests and things I want to write about to be that narrow. But I have learned that is my strength; my newsletter is sometimes sprawling but the thread that ties it all together is me and if I am passionate and excited about something, my readers will be too. And if they’re not, they don’t have to read every single issue I send. There’s something for most people here. I’ve also had a lot of readers tell me that they came for one thing (say, queer pop culture analysis) and discovered a love for another (like sports). Which is dope!
I never intended to do link round-ups but after I mostly left social media I found I had a lot of things I wanted to share or provide a line or two of comment on and nowhere to do it so I brought that here and I’ve been pretty shocked to find that they’re my most popular posts. I get more engagement from my link round-ups than from the stuff I spend hours or weeks on. They’re less labor-intensive than a lot of those things too so I’m not complaining, but it’s interesting to notice!
I try to keep myself to one round-up and one other post per week, at minimum, with three newsletters per week feeling like the sweet spot. I don’t want to overwhelm readers but I want to be putting out consistent content. I keep an eye on my open rate, which still hovers around 50%, which is very good and tells me that people enjoy what I’m sending so I’m going to keep sending it.
What's a pop culture topic you'd love to write about but haven't?
I’ve been toying with an essay about late-in-life lesbianism tied to reality stars/celebs like Kyle Richards from RHOBH, Chrishell Stouse from Selling Sunset, and Sophia Bush (more on her this weekend!), that also brings in TikTok, my personal social circle, and studies on later in life sexual fluidity in women (and why I think their conclusions are potentially wrong). Speaking of Selling Sunset, I have wanted to write about the workplace politics of that show for a while, as well as something about Sister Wives/The Duggars/Welcome to Plathville and how these shows that started as vehicles for proselytizing have become platforms to watch women free themselves from oppressive religious upbringings.
omg would sooo love to read your take on later-in-life lesbianism/sexual fluidity and those reality stars!
I am blown away by how you created something out of nothing for yourself and took it to pretty much the highest level possible, writing for those publications. And with small kids (my oldest was also born in 2014)! And three posts a week! 🥵 You're doing good work.